Tuesday, April 24, 2012

3 Not To Be Missed

The seminal scriptures of modern-day environmentalism were Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Paul R. Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” and the publications of the Club of Rome. While stylistically quite different, these books all served to rally the public around a core anti-human philosophy. As the Club of Rome put it, “The Earth has cancer, and the cancer is man.”

Early this morning, campus police at Western Kentucky University (WKU) refused to stop vandals from draping condoms on the top of small crosses in the campus stadium – these crosses, all 3,700 of them, symbolize how many unborn children die through abortion each day in the US and were installed by the Hilltoppers for Life group on campus. The vandals were art students who claimed the condoms were part of an art project.

The Hilltoppers for Life group members, who had been keeping an eye on their display through the night in reaction to similar acts of vandalism to pro-life displays at other campuses including nearby Northern Kentucky University, asked the art students to stop and then called campus police. The students refused and the campus police just stood by and watched.

The number of Americans on food stamps (or, as it is now called, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) is higher than ever before, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report. Since 2007, rolls have grown by 70 percent. And participation rates are expected to increase over the next two years.

While some of the growth can be attributed to the recession, participation rates were steadily climbing prior to the recession. Since 2000, the number of Americans on food stamps has jumped by roughly 260 percent, from 17.2 million to 44.7 million in 2011.

Naturally, government spending on food stamps has also jumped, from approximately $20 billion in 2000 to a whopping $78 billion last year, a nearly 400 percent increase.

The growth in participation rates seems to be part of the federal government’s goal, as a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture released just this month explains.

Would you like to keep up-to-date with the best of Vital Signs Blog? It's easily done.Just contact us right here and ask to receive our Weekly Top Ten, a free e-mail service sent out every weekend with Denny Hartford's selections for the most important posts of that week.